Thursday 11 November 2010 19.05 EST
First published on Thursday 11 November 2010 19.05 EST

Twenty-first century politics is often said to lack ambition. That is not a criticism that could be levelled at Iain Duncan Smith's vision of a reconstructed benefits system, a unified credit that is both simple to operate and responsive to changing circumstance. So it is sad that a good idea has been couched in the language of blame, and sadder still that it risks being undermined by economic reality – at a time of an uncertain and, according to yesterday's inflation report, possibly jobless recovery. There is never an easy time to reform (which is why Labour flunked the challenge even in the good years). But nor could there be a more difficult time than now, when half a million public sector jobs and probably as many more in the private sector are threatened. The dilemma has always been that a shortage of jobs makes welfare indispensible, but equally unsustainable. Yesterday's white paper, Welfare that Works, is the answer to only half the problem.

Mr Duncan Smith is rightly angry about the number of long-term jobless and he is right that the benefits system has become part of the problem. Its complexity, the length of time it can take to process claims, the sharpness with which they are withdrawn when a claimant takes a job – and then the risk of starting all over again if the job disappears – can make the prospect of work much more daunting than it is rewarding. If the Duncan Smith proposals fulfil their ambition of tackling those problems, it will be an unalloyed good thing. But there are some hard questions to answer, not least because alongside Mr Duncan Smith's seriousness of purpose are headlines that speak of malingerers, or scroungers, and even (from Mr Duncan Smith himself) sin. A belief in personal responsibility is no justification for branding the weak and vulnerable as moral outcasts. It introduces a damaging element of prejudice to a project that Mr Duncan Smith would claim is based on principle alone.

There are many and complex reasons why people don't work and tackling them when they have become deeply embedded is a long, costly job. Mr Duncan Smith is promising to tackle them with innovative results-based initiatives. He'll need them: the DWP faces cuts of a quarter of its core budget by 2014-15, and has a standstill overall budget. Making ends meet could mean shedding as many as 15,000 jobs. Already, jobcentre review interviews average just over seven minutes – barely enough time to sit down and say hello, and nowhere near long enough for the kind of support that similar projects have found essential for sustainable employability.

What is most contentious is that Mr Duncan Smith insists the jobs are there. He is right that there is a lot of churn, that nine out of 10 people who lose their job even now find another within weeks. Where he is wrong is in his claim that the number of migrant workers in Britain proves there is plenty of work for those prepared to take it. Migrant workers are certainly good at finding jobs: that is why they are here. But migrant workers tend to be young, single, well-educated and, self-evidently, mobile. Where they get jobs in areas of high unemployment, it is because they have skills local people lack. They are employable in a way the people branded in yesterday's headlines as malingerers are not. The malingerers narrative appears to be a justification for new, tough sanctions (though sanctions do already exist) which could include the withdrawal of all benefits for up to three years, a "nuclear option" whose value is said to be its deterrent effect. Curiously, the DWP's own research has found it doesn't work.

Mr Duncan Smith's defenders (including Nick Clegg in this paper on Wednesday) like to compare the scale and intention of his plans with the Beveridge report of 1942.They forget there was a second Beveridge report, in 1944: Full Employment in a Free Society. He knew that without jobs, the welfare state wouldn't work.